Composition with yellow, blue, black, red, and gray

Mondrian had got back to Paris in 1919, after the war stranded him in the Netherlands for five years, and by 1921 the grammar he would use for the rest of his life was settled. Black lines running out to the edges, the three primary colours, flat white between them. Grey is in this one as well, handled as a colour in its own right, something he did in the early 1920s and gave up later. He had set out the reasoning the year before in a pamphlet printed in Paris, Le Néo-Plasticisme. Almost nobody bought the paintings. Through the same years Mondrian covered his rent partly by making watercolours of single flowers, chrysanthemums and amaryllis, soft and naturalistic and nothing like the grids, and those sold without any trouble.